No it is exactly the kind of landgrab that shouldn't happen. GPT is a universal term and OpenAI didn't even come up with it. By rights it should be either not held by anybody or by the people that initially made it a well known term within the industry. Because it would be absolutely outrageous if OpenAI ended up in a position to use trademark law against the party that came up with a term.

Trademark law is not about these moralistic feelings. It’s about distinguishing commercial parties. If I see “GPT” I expect it’s from OpenAI.

Anyone can still use the term just not in offering a commercial product.

You can expect what you like. It doesn't make it correct or not stupid or the opinion of the public in general.

I see GPT I read 'generative pre-trained transformer' which is a thing that others have built prior to OpenAI.

You’re in the great minority here. The vast majority of people who see GPT in a commercial product will expect it to be from OpenAI.

No, that's just their PR. The vast majority of people don't know what OpenAI is, nor care.

No it isn't. I prefer Nvidia's GPT and the (actually) open GPTs. GPT is used by non-specialists to refer to whichever app they're using at the time, whether that uses an OpenAI API behind it or not.

After talking with (random) people, I'm convinced "ChatGPT" is just a synonym for every new AI app.

I don't think others share that opinion, especially in the public sphere. GPT-{number} and ChatGPT are, for me, valid trademarks as they identify OpenAI's specific product; but somethingGPT is such a generic name at this point, and GPT such an alternate name for language-based AI, that it really doesn't identify OpenAI. (even ChatGPT is an alternate name for any chat AI at this point, but I feel it's fair that OpenAI doesn't let anybody else call their product "a ChatGPT" (I'm not too sure about trademark law but I think that leaves "a ChatGPT-like AI chatbot" open))